


(these are the things) i can do without;

by frostmantle



Series: sagaciously salacious [5]
Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Breathplay, Established Relationship, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Garlean Warrior of Light (Final Fantasy XIV), Light Bondage, Undernegotiated Kink, consensual but not really safe or sane, i am trash and i've accepted it, i don't know why i wrote this but you're all going to suffer with me, i stan two danger nerds, i wrote porn instead of working on my longfic w h o o p s, i'm really not writing these in any particular order y'all lmao, nebulous post-stb timeline, no beta we just die, not without a safe word or a gesture anyway, seriously kids don't try this at home
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-03
Updated: 2020-06-03
Packaged: 2021-03-03 23:42:09
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24524047
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frostmantle/pseuds/frostmantle
Summary: and when you've taken down your guardif i could change your mindi'd really love to break your heartoh, i'd really love to break your heart
Relationships: Nero tol Scaeva/Warrior of Light
Series: sagaciously salacious [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1392652
Comments: 23
Kudos: 50





	(these are the things) i can do without;

**Author's Note:**

> i make no excuses for this other than i am a feral trash goblin with a toy ship i will continue to sail into the sunset
> 
> ~~aka something i would have put in kissing book but it's almost 6K and i'm not about that life~~

As per usual, Nero Scaeva had only himself to blame for his current predicament (pleasant though it was).

 _Name your price and I will pay it,_ he had said, and he really ought to stop making such impulsively _magnanimous_ gestures in order to get himself out of hot water every time he crossed the eikon-slayer's temper. Particularly on those occasions when it stood a fair chance of ending poorly for him-- which, he owned, was somewhat often.

In his defense, he _had_ expected that fulfilling a 'favor of her choosing' would have something to do with one of her adventurous impulses. He simply hadn't considered the possibility that this might be the sort of adventure on the table. Table- or bed, as it happened. In this case the four-poster in her bedroom to which he had been bound. 

Aurelia sat on her mattress alongside his prone form with her feet tucked primly beneath her knees, clad in only a short chemise and a pair of smallclothes as she studied her knotwork (and really, whomever had taught _the most objectively terrifying woman on the godsdamned star entire_ how to tie strips of vanya silk as if they were nautical rigging on a Limsan frigate could get buggered as far as Nero was concerned), looking for any weakness in her technique. 

" _Really,_ sweetling, all this over one broken alembic, and one barely worth the name, at that. Was your plan simply to _frustrate_ me into submission?"

Nero was a born contrarian. He had prided himself upon that fact since boyhood, had pontificated upon it during his various clashes with one Cid Garlond, and very often had relied upon it to win arguments with Livia sas Junius on more than one occasion in his less-than-illustrious past. He was, in short, what an army recruiter might politely term ‘spite-motivated.’ Or perhaps he simply had the perverse urge to find out to what extremes she might be driven should he ever manage to push all of Aurelia’s buttons. 

Although that particular remark, he allowed, _might_ have perhaps been a step too far. She leveled upon him a stare that could have frozen an industrial forge. 

"All things considered, I really should do just that," she retorted. "I _can_ if you like."

"By all means, please continue."

The Warrior of Light was not a woman given to displays of ill temper. That said, perhaps she might not glower in the precise same way that Garlond did, but hells bedamned if the last time Nero had seen this exact look on her face hadn't been right before she proceeded to wreck every toy in his Castrum Meridianum laboratory and wipe the floor with him for good measure.

His grin was a challenge, a silent gauntlet tossed at her feet. It did not go unnoticed.

"Your willingness to cooperate does you great credit," she said with false sweetness. "I assume you won't mind if I take my time, then, as I'm certain you shall find it no great task to remain still-- and _silent_."

So saying, she answered his insolent smirk with a smile of her own and leaned forward with one slender hand braced upon his chest. Overeager fool that he was, he dropped his guard. His jaw went slack, anticipating the plush softness of lips pressed against his and the velvet heat of a tongue to slide against his teeth.

Instead, he received a mouthful of silk for his trouble. 

He tried to curse in surprise, but all that left his mouth was a muffled growl of annoyance before the gag was pulled taut -- not enough to hurt or to chafe, but it ensured that the use of his words would be too much effort for him to bother. Still, that was harmless enough, and Nero supposed he should have expected it when she had told him exactly what sort of favor she intended to have him grant. A light slap, a bite or ten, perhaps (though he sincerely doubted it, knowing her) a bit of dirty talk. 

Charming if rather _pedestrian_ , in his personal estimation, as far as such things went-- but one had to start somewhere.

She did none of those things. She touched him with light, tickling trails of her fingers from collarbone to navel, showering a line of tiny kisses along his hairline and then his brow and cheekbone, traversing a warm, sweet path downward. Amused at the notion that such a delicate touch would have any real effect on him, Nero allowed himself to relax and enjoy her soft attentions, lulled into lazing contentment right up until the moment her teeth nipped at the soft skin just beneath his jaw. 

He hissed his discomfort around the gag, at the tiny, sharp pinprick of pain amidst the warmth, and then there was another, and then another as she made her slow and unhurried way along his neck, one side, then the other. At the fleshy juncture that met the plane of his shoulder, she latched onto him in earnest, suckling gently through the sharp sting of her teeth, tongue flickering over the bruise she left behind as if to soothe. 

Nero did not need a looking-glass to know what he would see: violet-red marks blooming like flowers upon the canvas of his flesh from ears to the base of his throat, marks that would be clearly visible even above the high neckline of his work doublet. 

Violence thoroughly leashed beneath that soft and ladylike exterior, he thought, how very strangely apropos for a killer of gods. 

The thought set his nerves alight. Heat and tension flickered through his stomach, tightening like the bonds that held him trapped, and beneath it he felt the twitching of his cock, nudging against the barrier of his smalls with slowly escalating insistence. He exhaled through the corners of his mouth, his eyes fluttering shut for a handful of moments.

What she had traversed with fingertips she now traced more intimately, dragging the damp softness of her mouth over every sensitive spot she knew he had. Tiny bites across his collarbone, barely openmouthed kisses along his sternum that seemed to sear him with each touch of her lips, a saucy flicker of her tongue over a puckering aureole, and the maddening tickle of her hair trailing close behind, warm and golden as it tumbled over his chest. 

His limbs trembled as though he were - at thirty-four winters! - the callow schoolboy he had once been, breaths coming in quick and shallow sips through his nose by the time she pulled herself upright. 

Her fingertips traced the border of flesh and cloth just below his waist, ruffling the wiry curls that peeked slyly from the waistband of his smallclothes, her nails ghosting in light and careful strokes over the firm ridge of his erection through his smalls. Nero’s hips surged upwards, trying to find something, anything to grind against-- only to meet resistance in the flat of her palm pressed against his stomach. _Gods damn it-_

“If you can be a good boy and stay still for me,” she said, “then I’ll let you talk again.”

A stab of alarm curled through his gut when she moved back towards the bedside and turned away from him -- _surely_ she would not be so brutal as to make good on her threat to stir him and leave him to suffer -- and then he felt the shimmy of the mattress, saw her hands at her hips as they slid down her flanks. She was not leaving but merely removing her smallclothes. 

He sucked in a soft breath through his nose. The heat below his waist had increased steadily with her teasing, and when her fingers brushed against his trapped cock in the process of reaching for his waistband he uttered stifled curses in Ilsabardian into his mouthful of silk, blunted nails digging into his palms enough to hurt. 

Forcing himself to still his hips while she worked the laces loose, while she tugged his smalls down his hips and freed his length from their confines, aching and heavy: that was a uniquely exquisite agony. 

She extended one of those lovely, powerful legs to straddle his waist so that she knelt astride him like a riding chocobo. Embarrassing as it was he couldn’t stifle the helpless groan he made at the sight of damp honey-gold curls hovering mere ilms above him, radiating palpable warmth. 

“Don’t move,” she whispered, and braced one hand upon the neatly carved edge of her headboard.

The other wrapped about his flushed and throbbing cock, adjusting the angle with achingly slow precision until the head nudged at her entrance. His eyes were open enough to see the intense focus on her face as she began to lower herself onto him, and in that same instant he was all but lost in the sensation of soft, wet heat enveloping his crown, a desperately desired friction that felt even more of a shock to the senses with his control wrested from him.

He observed her silent expression of bliss in open fascination: the slow backward tilt of her head, the delicate arch of her neck, her soft and breathy sigh, nails dragging light furrows into his flanks as she took him into herself. Sliding smoothly into liquid heat until he was swaddled in it, from base to tip. 

The sensation was almost enough to break his resolve. Almost---but not quite. 

Nero grunted against the gag that bound his tongue flat against the floor of his teeth, and his forearms twitched, the tug of his wrists insistent against the restraints of silk that bound them to the posts. But he remained still, bent his entire being on it, even as he wanted more than anything to move, to _thrust_ , the very thing she had said she would not yet allow. 

At last she had settled carefully atop him, as soft and warm without as within, the plush curve of her rear cushioning her weight against his hips. She reached out to hook one index finger in the fabric and tug it free from his mouth, and he wasted no time in opening it.

"I am fairly certain," he began, his voice laden with sarcasm, “that this novel method of yours constitutes _torture_ beneath imperial jurisdiction.”

"Don't be so dramatic."

He released a resigned sigh- a short, soft huff. "Sweetling," he said, plaintively. "You are cruel to me. _Cruel_."

"And _you_ are altogether too accustomed to getting what you want when you want it." She kissed each corner of his mouth. "You _willingly_ surrendered yourself to my tender mercies and I intend to enjoy every second of it." 

"Something tells me 'tender' might be debatable." 

"Is it? You are quite clearly enjoying this."

"Perish the thought,” he smirked, though that too was quickly becoming an effort. Her hand left the headboard to stroke the planes of his torso, tracing lines of old scars and muscle, following the path of golden filament curls downwards to their joining at the base of his belly. 

"Perish _nothing_. I'll wager you dreamt about this plenty of times before we even met." Aurelia nipped at one of the bruise marks she’d left on him, and the resulting moan buzzed against her lips as they trailed down the column of his throat. "Nero tol Scaeva, the right hand of the Black Wolf, bound to the eikon-slayer's bedposts whilst she rides him-"

"Left."

She clenched around him, a rippling squeeze as thrilling as it was diabolically deliberate. “Hmm?”

"Left," his back arched like a bow strung too taut, knees flexing and heels digging into the mattress, "his left-hand man, darling, I'm _left-handed_ -"

"Pedantic _and_ filthy? Truly, I have won Garlemald's greatest prize." Her laugh was a whisper against his collarbone, laden with tolerant amusement. "Though I must allow that you _are_ quite charming when you’re this desperate." 

"And I will neither confirm nor deny-" She rocked atop him with a thrust and his breath stuttered to a halt before he hissed out an oath, "- _confirm nor deny_ the contents of my fantasies, no matter _what_ you do to wring them out of me, you thrice-damned _temptress_." 

"Goodness, you are so _complimentary_ tonight. Perhaps we ought do this more often- or at all."

"Let me move.”

“No.”

“So help me, I will _chew_ through these," he cut himself off with a howl of growing exasperation when her teeth sank into a nipple, “buggered bits of godsdamned _frippery_ if I must.”

"Will you? But say the word and I'll relent." She sat upright. The curve of her grin was teasing and triumphant. "Perhaps."

"You think to have me _beg_ you for release?" 

She did not answer but instead set herself to work unlacing the neckline of the short undergarment she still wore. Though Nero was well aware it was a show for his benefit, he was unable to look away as she coaxed the knots to unbind and eased the leather strips through each opening. 

Once she had judged the laces loose enough, she grasped the hem with both hands and pulled her last article of clothing over her head in a single fluid motion. Muscles shifting in deceptively powerful thighs, the long waves of her hair curling in graceful honeyed patterns over smooth skin flushed and dewy with sweat, she leaned forward to brace her hands along either side of his torso. Gravity tilted the soft swell of her breasts forward in kind to slide over his chest: just enough of a taste of her to torment. 

"Once I've freed myself-" 

The threat died on his lips when her fingers tangled in the thick curls at his nape. He growled in frustration. "You won't."

"Don't tell me what I won't do." The grip on his hair tightened as if she were scruffing a kitten. "Aurelia, I will _break this bloody bed_ ," he hissed. _"Do not tempt me."_

“I suppose that is one way to get what you want." He'd hoped he might provoke her temper, give him an upper hand. Instead, Aurelia smiled at him, soft and winsome, her grip on his hair relaxing and her fingers descending to trace the shell of his ear. He stared at her, unable to maintain even playful belligerence in the face of this new distraction, feeling suddenly and unaccountably flustered. "You can also have what you want if you just ask me nicely."

“You mean if I debase myself enough to beg you for the privilege.”

 _"If you ask nicely,"_ she stressed. "And say it like you mean it."

Nero was fairly certain he was in trouble. The sting of those bites and the sensation of his hair pulling against his scalp left him with far less care for his pride than he might otherwise have owned, and the near-glacial pace of her hips was quickly eroding what remained of his willpower. But he did nothing in half-measures and he was _not_ going to give in without at least a token resistance. It simply wasn't in his nature.

" _Dearest_ hero," he purred. He dipped his chin so that his lips brushed against hers and in the softest and most conciliatory voice he could muster, he whispered: _"Make me."_

The grin he gave her was the widest, most shameless, most infuriating, most _insufferable_ he could possibly muster, and Aurelia---

Her answering smile was as bright and hard as an uncut diamond. 

Seven hells. He was _definitely_ in trouble. 

Nero was bracing himself for some sort of retaliation - perhaps she would grasp another handful of his hair and pull, or bite, or deliver a blow to his flank - so when she instead rested her cheek upon his shoulder, lips gently nuzzling at his neck and hands stroking his sides in a light and careful caress, he was left at something of a loss.

"Are you certain?" she murmured. “You would rather fight me?”

That low and husky whisper jolted its way straight down his spine. 

Refusing to answer, he caught his lower lip between his teeth. Her lips drifted about his earlobe, and with a torturously slow roll of her hips, she drew it into her mouth and tugged with the barest scrape of her teeth before releasing him. A groan welled deep within his gut, made almost nasal by its escape from the depths of his throat. Her nails scraped over his stomach, just enough to raise gooseflesh as they drifted down to his hipbones, then inward until her fingertips stopped at the space where they joined.

There was nowhere left for them to wander, and he grit his teeth when she circled the base of his cock with index finger and thumb in slow strokes.

"Well, 'tis a terrible shame you can't bring yourself to be aught besides stubborn." She was touching herself now; her fingers trailed over the folds that had spread open to accommodate him and kept moving until the heel of her palm rested perhaps an ilm below her navel. Her index and middle fingers curled in, very gently- once again, just enough to tantalize him, to torment. "I _could_ force you to lie there and watch me pleasure myself- if that is really what you'd prefer."

"Aurelia," he began, wetting his dry lips with the tip of his tongue. 

She said nothing, only smiled. Sweat rolled down his temples from the crushing effort he exerted to not only remain still beneath her ministrations but to appear unaffected by them. It was a fight he knew full well he was losing; when she leaned toward him again it was like watching a hunter approaching to see what fantastic creature she had caught in her snare.

Her other hand trailed a fair expanse of collarbone and shoulder, bruise-mottled and flushed, paused at the soft hollow of his throat, then carefully wrapped about his neck. She applied no pressure, but her thumb tracked in idle lines over the rhythmic throb of his jugular. 

She might as well have squeezed, in truth. The sound that emerged from his own mouth was something strangled and desperate, and on its heels before he could stop himself-

_"Please-"_

-came surrender. 

Nero swallowed, the sound a very audible click. A large part of him was mortified at just _how_ quickly he'd acquiesced to her teasing the moment she’d dared to grip him thus, but he was painfully hard and he was trying not to think about how much of it was directly related to that soft hand and the remembered warmth of it as she closed it around his throat.

Movement along his neck at last: her hand, sliding back into his hair. He felt something akin to disappointment before she gave the curls at his nape a cheeky little tug.

"You have permission to move," she whispered.

His soft sigh was the only warning she received before he flexed his legs just enough to brace his feet for traction and bucked. 

The sharp upwards thrust tore a high-pitched cry from her lips. She released her hold on his hair when the motion unbalanced her, slamming the flat of her palm back against the headboard hard enough that they both winced at the cracking sound of its impact. He gave her exactly enough time to regain her balance before he repeated the movement, and she doubled over, tucking her head beneath his chin. A third repetition, a fourth, a fifth: slow and savage thrusts that left her writhing atop him.

Unable to resist the opportunity to tease even through the haze of his own lust, Nero grinned at her.

"Lost control of your _steed_ , have you?"

Rebuttal took the form of a fierce kiss, one he accepted with a low and greedy moan into her mouth. When she relinquished him to take air, her mouth damp and slightly swollen, her dark violet-blue eyes shone with that hard, determined expression he secretly so loved to see.

"If a racing chocobo cannot unseat me, _tribunus_ ," she breathed, panting audibly, "I harbor serious doubts that _you_ will fare better."

"I have put that particular chapter of my life behind me. That said, if you mean to have me put your riding skills through their paces," his smile took on a feral cat's curl, "I am told my testing methodologies trend towards the rigorous."

His motions eased as he taunted her, just enough to savor his riposte; it wasn't as though he were entirely in possession of his faculties, after all. 

Aurelia took only a moment to consider her response before she lifted her hips perhaps an ilm or so; he clenched his teeth at the friction of it. Honey-blonde hair draped about his face like a curtain as she loomed over him, ragged breaths fanning against his brow with each shallow inhale and exhale. There was the slightest pressure of her lips just along the lower rim of his third eye: a tiny kiss that was sweet and almost maidenly, at stark odds with the deep rosy flush that had settled into her skin.

Her other hand abandoned its ministrations to trace the expanse of upper chest and collarbone--fingers damp with her slick, but almost unnoticeable with the heat and sweat that clung to them both-- until he felt light and careful pressure once more, the sensation of her palm stroking softly from ear to shoulder. It felt as though he had invited a predator in heat to brace its maw about his neck, either to claim him as her mate or to crush his trachea beneath her bite.

His breath stilled for that one moment, trembling and trapped, and the smile the eikon-slayer bestowed upon him was incandescent.

"Well," she whispered, "one can only hope."

Her thighs clenched to hold herself fast against him, knees digging firmly into his ribs as she met his thrusts with a roll of her hips-- moving with him so that she would not harm him, he realized (that quip about racing chocobos had been no idle jest, it seemed). The bedposts made an alarming cracking sound, but the bonds held fast despite the tension.

His hands clenched into fists so taut that his knuckles went white and his forearms strained; he wanted her to make good on that promise, wanted to feel her fingers closing around his throat- 

His next words seemed to wrest themselves free of his lips of their own accord. He wasn't actually certain she'd heard his request at first until, without stilling the motion of her hips against his, she adjusted her stance.

Her hand grasped the curved outer edge of the headboard she'd carved for purchase until her weight rested against the forearm she had braced against the stained rosewood, slim shoulders rising and dropped with shallow breaths, flushed the same lovely rose as her cheeks as she peered down at him.

"Nero, I don't-" a particularly deep thrust wrenched a stifled whimper from her lips and her reflexive clench knocked the breath from his lungs in a glorious gut punch, an echo of that earlier thrill, "I don't want to hurt you-"

"You won't." The warmth of her touch, the weight of battle-calloused fingers and palm, threatened to slip away with her hesitation. He didn't _want_ her to be gentle. Not right now. "I promise."

Doubt lingered in her eyes but she leaned towards him. Golden hair fell forward in a soft shower, the shining locks loose and curling from the heat between them, space somehow silent and filled all at once as she sighed--

\--and relented. Her thumb rolled over his pulse, carefully applying pressure. 

The engineer's breath escaped him in a harsh and painful gasp.

Fingers closing about the straps of cloth that bound them to her bedposts, he strained and writhed beneath her, reveling within the twin cages of her hand about his throat and her cunt about his length. His hips snapped forward and up in rapid strokes, renewing and increasing his pace, seeking end in whatever form it might take.

Starbursts of color prickled at the periphery of his vision, tears leaking from the corners of his eyes. He was acutely aware of his heartbeat, throbbing through the length of his body from his compressed throat to the engorged tip of his cock, the sound of it muffled and distant as though he were underwater. His prize was the most intense orgasm of his life; the wager against it, his mortality. It was both terrifying and exhilarating. 

As the heat and pressure ratcheted upwards, self-inflicted strangulation coiling into the tension of approaching ecstasy, he felt increasingly certain that one of two things would happen: either he would lose consciousness or simply expire betwixt the eikon-slayer's thighs. Coming and dying at the same time. 

_Well, Scaeva, you could certainly choose worse ways to go,_ he thought. 

A choked laugh sputtered past his lips but he had no time to give the matter either regret or further consideration. Liquid fire seemed to settle into the base of his spine and sear itself into his bones like a branding iron. His entire being was consumed by mindless sensation, a tempering with a single base purpose, and cogent thought failed against it.

Moments later her constriction eased just enough to relieve the growing ache in his chest. Climax and relief came so close on the heels of each other that time itself seemed to collapse inward; he could not tell where one ended and the other began. The scrape of air against the burning brand of his throat faltered, stuttered into a cracked and desperate moan at the same instant he felt the heat of his own release spilling into the grasp of slick heat and smooth muscle. 

His vision faded to black at the edges for long moments and his pulse throbbed through his temples, and he kept moving, the motion of his hips slowing by increments into eventual stillness as euphoria began to fade, heat and sensitivity bordering upon overstimulation.

Nero could perceive the withdrawal of her palm from its place about his throat, the trail of her fingertips at their ingress, the impression of movement just above. Her knuckles brushed slick flesh and the wiry hairs at his base and on the edge of consciousness he felt her shudder, thighs rigid and shaking; she cried out wordlessly and her fingers stilled. He groaned as she spasmed around him.

For some few moments the pair were locked in exhausted stasis; the only sound that passed was inhale and exhale, hot and labored. 

Her hands returned to the back of his neck and then his wrists, one at a time, tugging and plucking, and he realized she was loosening his bonds. His arms fell limp and half-numbed to the sheets as she gathered the silk and discarded it somewhere between the bed and the side table. He managed to summon enough strength to move a few ilms, then grimaced at the protesting ache in his shoulders and the overflow that had made it onto his hips and belly and into the sheets.

"Stay there," Aurelia panted, sounding as broken as he felt, "stay there, just let me-"

She braced her weight one last time against the headboard and eased herself up to roll her weight out of the low-slung cradle of his hips and onto the mattress, fingers clasped securely between her legs as she did so in a valiant (but ultimately futile) effort to _contain_. Nero happened to catch her eye right as she made the exact same face he did - a wince that was somewhere between discomfort and distaste - and laughed weakly. 

Aurelia blinked at him in momentary confusion, then her expression eased into a rueful, rather embarrassed smile. 

"...I can't bloody believe I did that."

"Well," he ran a hand through sweat-soaked curls, "I did ask you for it."

His smile, largely unrepentant, lingered as she exhaled with a deep heave of her chest and reached for the pitcher on the side table. "I was worried I might have hurt you. I _could_ have hurt you."

"But you didn't." There was no response, only the sound of pouring water. He leveraged his weight onto his elbows to try and sit up and was shocked at how much effort that single act required. "However, point taken. Discussion later when we're both a bit less scrambled?"

"Agreed. Here, drink this."

He felt the warm whisper of her breath on his cheek and a brief press of her lips before the tin cup was pushed gently into his nearest hand. The water was cold and clean and tasted sweet. He swallowed slowly, letting it ease the rawness of his throat. 

She poured water into the small bowl on the table and wrung out a hand-towel and Nero watched her face as she tended to herself before selecting a second cloth to do the same for him. Her expression was once again calm and pensive, though her flush remained, her hair softly disheveled. Ignoring the ache in his arm he reached up to tuck a damp forelock out of her eyes, tucking it behind her ear.

"Do you think," she began, then caught herself, "Never mind."

"Hm? No, go on."

The wet cloth idled upon the mild rise of his hipbone at his encouragement. Her cheeks seemed to bloom almost crimson with self-consciousness, dark blue gaze listing towards the edge of her pillow before shyly flickering upwards to meet his own periwinkle blue in a half-lidded, hesitant little smile that should _not_ have felt so appealing as it did, not so soon- and then she said:

"....I, ah. I think I would not... be entirely opposed to doing this again sometime. If you like."

"As chance has it, I think I would very much like." His eyes drooped shut. Seven hells, he was actually worn out. "...some other time."

She let out a small chuckle and kissed him again, ruffling his hair as she did so. Nero felt the weight on the mattress bounce slightly as she slid off the edge and onto the floor.

"Where are you going?"

"To powder my nose." Aurelia bent over and snatched a piece of cloth off the floor. "I'll be back in a few minutes."

She slipped past the partition; he could hear the weight of her footfalls as she climbed the stairs. Wearily he shut his eyes again, telling himself it was only for a moment or two. He didn't realize he had lapsed into a doze until a hand tapped his shoulder and he saw her standing there wearing nothing but the oversized drape of his shirt. She held a large plate in her hands. 

"I realized I was hungry and I thought you might be too," she said, smiling. "Sliced sourdough with Thanalan goat cheese. And those fig preserves I put up last week."

"...We're going to get crumbs all over the sheets, you know."

"That's for future me to worry about. Come on, sit up."

Nero did, leaning back against the pile of pillows, and found the plate shoved into his hands while she crawled back onto the mattress and flopped comfortably next to him with a tomestone in one hand. He set the plate on his thighs, tossed an arm around her shoulders, and selected one of the slices she'd laid out as she curled against his chest. They ate in companionable silence as she flipped through the contents of the tome with her thumb. 

"What's that?" he said around a mouthful of bread, cheese, and sweet fig. After their recent exertions, it tasted ambrosial. "Don't think I've seen this type of stone before."

"An 'irregular' tomestone, whatever that's supposed to be. I thought since I happen to have one of the most _brilliant_ engineering minds of the current age at my disposal, he might be persuaded to stay in bed with me and sift through some really choice Allagan data. What do you say?"

" _My,_ eikon-slayer," he drawled, "but you _are_ cold when it suits you. Tying a man to your bed just to use him for his translation services?"

She cast a coy little smirk over one shoulder. 

"I had to tempt you to stay _somehow._ " 

"A most unorthodox approach - if one to which I find myself quite reconciled. Did you make Garlond the same offer?"

"...I see that near-asphyxiation has done naught to lessen your cheek." She tweaked his ear, then rocked forward on her knees to reach for the empty plate. By some miracle, only a few crumbs had made it onto the coverlet. "You're using me for my wine cellar. I'd say it's a fair exchange."

"Then the answer is no, I assume?" 

"Answer?"

"You did not, in fact, make the same offer to Garlond."

Aurelia scoffed, turning her back to reach over the washbasin, and set the plate down in the open space on the far side. "Obviously not."

"Ha! Then you _admit_ you think me the expert."

"Cid would have translated it for free," she let out a loud and very unladylike yelp of laughter when his arms wrapped around her middle and dragged her across his thighs, "Wait, Nero, _wait-_ "

"We have _discussed_ these bloody comparisons of yours before-"

" 'Twas a _jest!_ " Aurelia managed between helpless, girlish snickers, squirming beneath the arm that pinned her and the fingers that mercilessly tickled her sides. " _Seven hells,_ that could not have had a more perfect outcome had I _contrived_ -"

"Surely you didn't think you were going to get away with that, you little _minx_."

Rather than offer further resistance to continue their tussle, she rolled beneath the press of his hand onto her back, arms draped gracefully over her head. The high ruffled neck of his doublet undershirt was unlaced and the open neckline plunged towards the edge of her sternum, hem rucked up far enough by their wrestling that it brushed the outer curve of her breasts in a way that kept catching his eye. 

His scowl eased and his hands stilled, and Aurelia saw she’d successfully disarmed him. 

"Actually," she grinned and tugged upon that single untameable forelock, curling it around her finger as her other hand circled about the nape of his neck, "I had rather hoped that I would not."

She coaxed him to close the distance. Her smile was as bright and unwavering as the sun. Another defeat at the eikon-slayer’s hands, he thought-- but hardly one he minded overmuch. 

Battles like this one, after all, were well worth the loss.

**Author's Note:**

> if you'd like to yell at me for my crimes against writing or simply meet like-minded people who love reading and/or writing stories about their adventures in hydaelyn, please feel free to join our book club! note: thirst for one (1) rat man optional. https://discord.gg/FB8hqkD


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